Were Million Inhabitants Announced Too Early?

Krasnodar, 17 September – Yug Times. The Krasnodar city authorities once again tried to count the townsfolk to reckon the city among the megalopolises.

It was not for the first time that the City Hall announced that the number of inhabitants in the Krasnodar urban agglomeration had exceeded a million. Over a year ago, then City Mayor Vladimir Yevlanov voiced the figure of 1.25 million inhabitants. Now, after a new attempt, The Yug Times is trying to figure out what Krasnodar may acquire together with a new status of a millionaire city.

According to Vladimir Verbitsky, assistant to Krasnodar City Mayor, who was reportedly using data of the regional police office, by the beginning of 2017 the city’s population had exceeded 1.3 million.

But the official statistics takes time to rank the Kuban capital among the millionaire cities. According to the Krasnodar regional statistical committee, in the first half of this year Krasnodar had only 972,952 inhabitants. At the same time, they confirmed the main dynamics of the migration movements.

At a roundtable with major developers held last June, Krasnodar Mayor Yevgeni Pervyshov
stated that over the past seven years the city’s population had increased by 350,000, thereby creating an additional burden to the city budget assessed at about a trillion rubles. “The status of a city with over a million dwellers will let it participate in federal target programs and resolve the infrastructural problems related to the fast growth of population,” said Mr. Pervyshov then.

In the Soviet time indeed the budgets of megalopolises used to be generously subsidized — but the time has passed, so that now Krasnodar, should it really become a ‘millionaire’, may count on no more than priority participation in federal programs. However, this happens quite seldom - the latest known precedent dates back to 2011, when the federal government allocated twice as much money for the construction of roads to the cities with over a million dwellers than to smaller cities and towns.